On First Day as Democrat, Specter (Again) Bucks His Party

President Obama said he will offer Sen. Arlen Specter his full support when Specter runs for re-election in 2010. Specter announced Tuesday that he will switch his party affiliation to the Democrats. Video by AP

Network News

Sen. Arlen Specter (Pa.) began his first full day as a Democrat since the early 1960s at a party-switching celebration hosted by President Obama and Vice President Biden. He ended it by casting another vote against Obama, opposing his budget as too authoritarian in the rules it establishes for the health-care debate later this year.

For almost 30 years, Specter vexed Republicans with a zigzagging legislative agenda that at times made him their closest ally and at others their worst enemy. Now he has decided to cross the aisle to join Democrats, and his intention to be provocative in his party remains evident.

After two days of telling his colleagues his decision, Specter settled in yesterday for a mix of celebration and an effort to return to his routine. He went from the White House to a 20-minute meeting in Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid's office to discuss his committee work, then met with postmasters from Pennsylvania and other constituents.

By this morning, the transformation will be officially complete, as Senate officials plan to unbolt Specter's desk from the right side of the chamber, where he has sat since January 1981, and wedge it into the cramped quarters on the Democratic side of the aisle.

"I'm interested in staying in the Senate, for good reason," Specter said in an interview yesterday.

His decision places the Democrats on the cusp of a 60-vote majority, pending the state Supreme Court hearings of the Minnesota Senate race. Although he praised Obama's stewardship in his first 100 days in office, Specter has repeatedly said the reason he is switching parties is the pursuit of his own agenda. After supporting Obama's $787 billion stimulus plan in February, Specter found himself under fire from conservatives back home, leading to a primary challenge from former representative Pat Toomey, who almost knocked him off in the 2004 GOP primary.

The fateful decision to switch, after 43 years of electoral politics as a Republican, came Sunday night at his son's suburban Philadelphia home, what Specter calls his "center of gravity" because he gets to watch his four granddaughters run around. He gathered his wife, Joan, and his eldest son, Shanin, around the kitchen table to hash out what he called his "undesirable options."

Trailing badly against Toomey, he could stay in a Republican primary and lose, or he could retire. But even Specter's 15-year-old granddaughter kept coming back to another option, encouraging her grandfather to change parties and run as a Democrat.

It would mean coming full circle. Specter first left the Democrats in the mid-1960s when he began his political career as a law-and-order GOP district attorney in Philadelphia.

He made his latest move, he said, because he was not done with the Senate, no matter which side of the aisle he had to sit on. Having survived tough elections before, he had also tackled brain and bypass surgeries in the 1990s and, most recently, two bouts of chemotherapy for cancer. Most of all, the ultimate survivor wanted to remain the self-proclaimed "champion" of medical research. "I think that research has saved or prolonged lives, including mine, and I want to continue to do that," Specter said yesterday.

His former GOP compatriots have turned on him. The National Republican Senatorial Committee flooded Pennsylvania with phone calls reminding Democratic voters of support for Specter in 2004 from then-President George W. Bush and Vice President Richard B. Cheney. The House Republican campaign outfit sent out a fundraising pitch called "Good Riddance," seeking to profit from conservative anger at Specter as a turncoat.